Peach-y Keen? Meh

By now you know the drill — an app hits the gossip circuit, and suddenly everyone spends the weekend inundating their friends with emojis, GIFs and other assorted animations.

If you haven’t checked it out, Peach is one drop Slack, another part Twitter, with a few pinches of Snapchat and Instagram.

It’s the work of Vine co-founder Dom Hofmann, who described the app as a, “fun, simple way to keep up with friends and be yourself.”

Not-So-Magic Words

The main differentiator for Peach over other social apps is a series of “Magic Words” you can employ to automatically insert some type of action.

For example, if you type GIF and then a search term you’ll get a moving image from Giphy’s public API.

Or you can post the current weather, roll a pair of dice, share your current location, or try your hand at a drawing (mine, as you can see, was terrible).

Your stream is a series of all the magic weirdness that others have shared.

You’ll know you’re one of the cool kids if you import your contacts and a bunch of your friends are already using Peach (not the case for me). Otherwise, you can pester them with an invite.

The app seems like a space to hang out and be sort-of social, though there are already numerous apps that people feel comfortable doing that with.

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and a few others have such a wide user base that the key for Peach will be convincing people to sign up for yet another social media experience.

Peach reminded me most of Secret, which had a meteoric rise and fall as an app for others to anonymously share information.

The use case is certainly different from Peach, but the similarity comes in how a social media application can go from blazing hot to nowhere very quickly.

No Clear Business Use

There also doesn’t seem to be any natural type of branding or business opportunities — maybe walk into a store and share a GIF with the retailer for a coupon? The app seems like it’s more about somewhat-mindless fun than targeted toward an end purpose.

Of course, some people are born entrepreneurs (or con artists) — and making the most of a new opportunity.

You can’t completely rule out any sort of pivot that becomes something. Snapchat looked like an app primarily geared toward sharing photos you didn’t want your parents to see until brands caught on with its use.

But Snapchat is illustrative: it’s easy to explain what the app is for. With Snapchat, you share and watch video.

Twitter (at least today) is for short messages and angry rants.

Facebook is for reading and writing status updates.

Peach is for … weird drawings? After trying it out over the weekend it just doesn’t have that addictive quality that makes me want to come back.

For now, a lot of people seem to be taking it in stride — despite the buzz.

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